After a week in the Taos area we started north and east toward the town of Raton and Sugarite State Park. On the way, because it was Memorial Day, we stopped at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial State Park outside of Angel Fire to pay our respects and to take a moment to be grateful to the people who served.
The drive eastward, through the Wheeler Peak Wilderness on Hwy. 64 with its mighty mesas, majestic mountains and deep canyons, is spectacular!
We landed in Sugarite (that’s Sugar-reet to us as don’t live around these parts) Canyon State Park outside of Raton near the Colorado border. This campground, located in a narrow, steep canyon, was the site of a small coal mining town which flourished between 1908 and 1941. Mining work drew immigrants from over 20 different nations who worked in brutal, low-paying jobs yet who enjoyed a rich and interesting community life. They formed rival camp baseball and soccer teams, had choirs and orchestras, dances and social clubs and many church activities. The remains of stone row houses, a company store, a school, the railroad bed, a doctor’s office, the community oven and a couple of mine entrances attest to the busy community that thrived here. Alice Lake and Chicorica Creek are now favorite fishing spots and we could see and smell the lilac bushes and ‘feral’ iris along the paths and old streets as we hiked about the place. I personally loved swimming in the cool mountain lake and sniffing out the critters. I think my fav was the campground hostess, nicknamed “Maddog” and her hubby, “One More Cast”, who always had a hug, a scratch and several cookies for me whenever we met. What’s not to love???
One day we headed out to the town of Folsom to see the sights at the Folsom Museum. Kae wanted to see the actual site of the anthropological discovery in 1926 of one of the oldest hunting camps in America. It had been a bison killing ground where evidence was found of 23 ancient bison and 19 projectile points. The type of stone projectile points, named Folsom Points, confirmed that man had occupied the New World longer than anthropologists had previously supposed – at least 10,000 years or more. The site unfortunately is on private land and has been closed to the public. The Folsom Museum mostly housed a jumbled collection of early settler and townspeople memorabilia but not much of any Folsom Point artifacts. Seems the town was flooded in 1908 and pretty much never rebuilt. Looks to me like the only thing keeping anything going now is this funky museum. There was also a really nasty small dog that liked to growl and nip, so we scooted out of there and took the scenic route back to Sugarite.
Our next adventure, as we traveled east toward Clayton Lake State Park on the Oklahoma/Texas/New Mexico border, was Capulin Volcano National Monument. This perfectly preserved cinder cone was created between 56,000 and 60,000 years ago and is startling in that its symmetry has been so well preserved by the thick covering of pinion pine, ponderosa and juniper, plus sumac, mountain mahogany, scrub oak and chokecherry bushes. Capulin (cah-poo-LEEN) is a Spanish word for chokecherry. Even more fun is the fact that you can walk right down into this volcano! It is one of the few places in the world where you can do that. A two mile road spirals around the cone, affording 360 degree views of four western states plus the great Rocky Mountain Range in Colorado, then ends in a parking area at the top. Two trails, one around the rim and one down into the volcano to the vent at the bottom, offer a unique volcano experience.
We stayed at Clayton Lake for a few days waiting for our mail to catch up with us, exploring the mudstone and sandstone buffs that surround this little fishing lake, examining the dinosaur tracks in the ancient seabed out near the dam’s spillway and just generally relaxing and getting caught up on things like naps, you know. These dinosaur tracks are approximately 100 million years old and were made by living dinosaurs walking in the soft sand and mud at the edge of a vast inland sea that stretched from the Artic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico through what is now the central bread basket of America. This area was a great marsh, full of many different types of plants and plant-eaters who lived at the end of the last dinosaur epic, the Cenozoic Era. It is amazing that these tracks can still exist after all the years of rain and wind and weather, but there they are, including some tail tracks; supposedly the only place in the world where such perfectly preserved tail tracks can be found. I can tell you they do not smell like anything but rock, plain old rock; so this old Dog can’t even verify if any animals made them or not; they are just rock to me.
Ancient Sea Bed
Wave Tracks
Dino Tracks
Worm Fossils
This area was hit by “a hundred Year storm” last December and folks all have stories of 40 foot drifts, being snow bound and the damage caused by all of that. We could see and smell the greening of the prairie and the blooming of all the trees and flowers due to the high water table and the still frequent storms that growled around us nearly every afternoon. It was heaven to this old guy to be able to swim and dig and sniff until I exhausted myself. This is sure a good life!
It was actually kinda hard to leave Clayton Lake because I had so enjoyed the swims and poking around. Guess I was maybe starting to feel a bit at home. As we packed up to leave one of my bird buddies, who had a nest in our ramada, dropped by to say so long and I felt that the herds of ‘contented cows’ out on Hwy.370 were sorta sad to see us go too. My Gals got a kick out of the ‘Grads Graffiti’ on the cliffs along this little isolated highway; that continuing need by mankind to leave a mark, I guess. I leave marks too but mine are biodegradable! Mother Nature leaves the best of all marks however; what is prettier than a rainbow, I ask ya??
This was the last stop in New Mexico before we begin our journey up through the “Navel of the Nation”. We will, of course continue to post our blogs and try to keep you updated on our wanderings. I do believe spring is finally springing because my fur is really flying and I keep sniffing out new and different flower smells. The green grasses and busy bird calls just make me feel lighter and springier. I hope that is true in your world, too. Stay well and stay in touch.
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